EXCHANGES WITH JAPAN, A LITTÉRATURE-ACTION N° 9, OCT.-DEC. 2020

Review par Catherine Dufour

May 15, 2021

Issue n° 9 of the international journal A littérature-action, coordinated by Martine Monteau, art critic, and Atsuko Nagai, professor at Sophia University in Tokyo and author of numerous studies on surrealism, places its first part under the sign of the Rm3 World Route Saint-Cirq-Lapopie / Tokaido.

The second part, Studies, readings, perspectives... is an eclectic mosaic of studies by / on French authors and artists (the sculptor Simone Boisecq), past or contemporary (Louis Chardoune / Geneviève Briot), and publications from around the world (Arab surrealism, works by the Antillean Daniel Boukman, the Algerian Mohammed Dib, the Mauritanian Beyrouk), etc. The journal's vocation is "transcultural," anti-colonial, feminist (Renée Vivien / Words of feminine desire) and engaged (Jean-Michel Devésa and the "yellow vests").

The third part, Creation-world, offers numerous original creations, textual or graphic, from all horizons, from Quebec poetry to writings by adolescents from a deprived neighborhood in Limoges.

It is the first part, Rm3 World Route Saint-Cirq-Lapopie / Tokaido, devoted to past and present exchanges with Japan, that will interest me here. It includes a dossier Surrealism in Japan, followed by two chapters devoted to contemporary artists, Japan / West Exchanges and The Artist Takeshi MOTOMIYA.

The editorials by Atsuko NAGAI and Martine MONTEAU, and by Laurent DOUCET, From Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and the journal A littérature-action, the World Peace Route passes through Japan, trace the exchanges with Japan that, since 2015, have marked the preparation of the present dossier. Should we recall that Laurent Doucet, co-director with Marie Virolle, ethnologist, of the journal A littérature-action, is also president of the association La Rose impossible which works for the rehabilitation of André Breton's former house in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, and instigator of the Rm3 (World Route n°3), imagined between this village and Japan to relay the utopia of the first world peace route opened in 1950 between Cahors and Saint-Cirq-Lapopie ("Borderless Route n°1", photos p. 6). From a trip to Japan in 2015, Laurent Doucet brings back a long poem, Japan. Midaré at the extreme of the West, of which Atsuko Nagai offers a Japanese translation in the chapter Japan / West Exchanges. Some time later, Kanji Matsumoto, one of the greatest Japanese scholars of surrealism, visits the Lot house and helps to find the former location of the Cahors café where Breton met Toyen... To testify to his interest in surrealism, Matsumoto offers his hosts a publication of Annie Le Brun's lectures given in Japan on the occasion of the centenary of André Breton's death, and the first Japanese translation of Radovan Ivsic's book, Remember this, remember everything well (Gallimard, 2015), evoking notably his Parisian years in Breton's entourage. Atsuko Nagai, invited in 2018 to the Saint-Cirq-Lapopie house, gives a paper on surrealism in Japan. It is on this occasion that, in the wake of a project to create a new world route to South America, envisaged by artists in residence at Saint-Cirq-Lapopie under the auspices of Argentine surrealism, the idea of creating the Rm3 emerged.

Beyond the anecdote, these events testify to the intensity of exchanges that have always existed between Japanese and Western avant-gardes. Laurent Doucet's editorial establishes a symbolic resonance between The Stones of Form (1941), a painting by the surrealist painter Gentaro Komaki inspired by the dôsojin, those ancestral stones placed at crossroads to thwart the influence of evil demons, and the milestones of the "Borderless Route." Confiscated by the Japanese fascist police, Komaki's painting was recreated by its author in 1950, at the time when André Breton, participating in a gathering of World Citizens, discovered Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. Would an objective chance link Komaki's work to Breton's Language of Stones (1957) and to this "visionary mineralogy" synonymous with a poetic breath disseminated throughout the world?

SURREALISM IN JAPAN

This dossier, illustrated by reproductions of works precisely commented on, extends two previous publications, coordinated by Martine Monteau and Atsuko Agai: Rising Suns (2014), special issue of the journal Passage d'encres, and the dossier Surrealism in Japan (2016) published in issue XXXVI of the journal Mélusine.

The link of surrealism with Japan is of a particular nature, due to the specificities of Japanese culture and art, rooted in the universe of dreams, the unconscious, and a Zen Buddhism associated with the principle of non-contradiction. The present dossier seeks to demonstrate this by analyzing the work of various artists.

In TAKIGUCHI and MIRÓ: a fertile exchange, Françoise NOVARINA-RASLOVLEFF describes the meticulous work carried out jointly by the painter Juan Miró and the poet Takiguchi, a major artist of surrealism in Japan. Practicing automatism from 1927 to 1931, he translated Breton's Surrealism and Painting in 1930 and published in 1936 the poem JOAN MIRÓ, in an anthology edited in Tokyo in collaboration with Breton and Éluard. During the Miró retrospective in Tokyo in 1966, he published a second poem in homage to the painter, WITH MIRÓ'S STARS. In a chapter of his monograph on Miró devoted to the painter's relations with Japan, Jacques Dupin insists on this agreement between poetry and painting that brings him closer to Eastern tradition. Miró and Takiguchi exchange poems and drawings and their correspondence results in two notable books, Proverbs of the Hand (1970) and In the Company of Stars (1978).

The article follows step by step the correspondence of the interested parties and their sometimes laborious collaboration. Miró indeed shows himself extremely demanding in the realization of the book, conceived as "a sculpture carved in marble" (p. 13) and not as a simple collection of illustrated poems. To realize it, he wishes to be inspired by Japanese calligraphy. Takiguchi sends him short poems, very close to Haiku. The final result, which required three years of trial and error, associates a simple and dense calligraphic drawing with a poetry "of beautiful architecture" (Miró, p. 15). The large horizontal format evokes the Japanese kakémono (Takiguchi, p. 15). In the Company of Stars, edited in Tokyo, gives rise to years of even more difficult negotiations. But the result, an "iconotext" (p. 21) folded in accordion, is exceptional. The drawings harmonize perfectly with the poet's vertical calligraphy. The entire lexicon of Miró (pictogram-characters, lines, elements of the body, nature and cosmos) is present in "this unfolded space," rhythmically punctuated by rich primary colors. The "conflict between the instant and duration, the visual and the discursive" (p. 21) is abolished.

Takigushi becomes passionate about Duchamp in his later years, creating works manifestly inspired by him, To and From Rrose Sélavy (1968), a book-object shown in Paris during the Duchamp exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (1977) or The Oculist Witnesses (1977), a three-dimensional multiple, realized in collaboration with the plastic artist Kazuo Okasaki. The article On Shuzô TAKIGUCHI: the direction of the index transcribes an interview between Kazuo OKAZAKI and Toshinori KUGA – who recall their collaboration with Takiguchi – and the researcher Nobuhiko TSUCHIBUCHI. In Takeguchi's long poem dedicated to Okazaki, which closes the article, one recognizes several allusions to works "matched in a box" (p. 31), in the Duchampian manner...

It is to Dali that one thinks when looking at the reproductions of Hamao Hamada's paintings (p. 38). Yoshiteru KUROSAWA gives the three keys to reading them in Hamao HAMADA: narrative time, scenic decoration and playful spirit. Very impressed by the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1937 in Tokyo, Hamada decisively turned toward surrealism, following Takiguchi. His landscapes and dreamlike scenes are closer however to movie posters and their narrative framework than to Dali's soft or psychoanalytic representations. The artifices of theater stage or cinematic projection, the taste for device triumph there, liberating tricks, double images, humor. Visions, onirism, latent imaginary capacity make this artist an authentic surrealist. His lecture Surrealism and Me (1975) testifies to a great desire for freedom in a repressive era. Japanese surrealism is in his eyes synonymous with "parody, satire, sophistication, black humor, joke, fumiste attitude or nebulosity," even "grotesque" (p. 34), even excretion, which is attested by his article ALL-TO-THE-SEWER (1939). His writing is of the purest surrealist vein, as one perceives in these few sentences: "My thrown heart spits water, coagulated water / The green hair of the armpits begins to wither" (p. 35).

Mobilized in 1944, the artist is sent to Manchuria. Returning to Tokyo in 1949, he founded in 1953, with draftsmen and photographers, a group of experimental creations very invested in advertising arts. His universe sometimes recalls that of Czech puppets. In 1970, a journalist published a description of Hamada's house, a "nest of objects": a "headless mannequin in the shadow of a plane tree, dressed in a fishing net, cicada remains scattered from his chest to the bottom of his garment," a thousand hands similar to those of a Buddha emerging from the heart of another mannequin, dusty dolls floating in the shadow, a "Satan with a wire body," a "paper man, a knife in the chest," a Greek Nike "made of molten metal waste," an insect-lamp, etc. (p. 37) This abandoned space could have been one of his most beautiful works, among his very varied productions, paintings, photos, objects, drawings, signs of a meaning to give to life.

The Photo-drawings and collages of EI-KYU analyzed by Shogo OTANI make one think of Man Ray. But this frequent comparison exasperated the artist to the point of depression, as it denied the specificity of his experiments. His photo-drawings, inaugurated in 1936 with Reason of Sleep, differ indeed from Moholy-Nagy's photograms or Man Ray's rayograms. To objects placed on the photographic plate, Ei-kyu added stencils of cut-out drawings, producing complex structures and multiple superimpositions. From his manipulations of the sensitive plate resulted violent images: threatening fangs encircling a cat corpse, hand emerging from an eye. The collages realized from 1937, including the Réel series, speak of the quest for another reality, explained in 1937 in his article On Reality. Those reproduced here exhibit, for example, the cut-out face of an actress, fragmented body parts or aberrant gatherings of organs. The disturbing presence of the eye, always mistreated, makes one think of Bataille and the severed head of Acéphale (1936). The eye inserted between spread legs (The Eye, 1936) even refers disturbingly to Story of the Eye (1928). Yet Bataille was not yet known in Japan at this time, despite his friendly frequentation of Okamoto Taro in Paris. Spirit of the times, objective chance, underground affinities? Whatever the case, Ei-kyu and Bataille shared without knowing each other the same skepticism toward a pseudo-rationality and aspired to this low "real" that haunts the journal Documents (1929). Shogo Otani insists on the fact that Ei-kyu was not "influenced" by the surrealists, but that he invented a world that, de facto, brought him closer to the surrealists.

Tomoyo SHIMUZU's article, The "Buddhist painting style" in Gentaro KOMAKI... a form of surrealism at the turning point of Japan's history, describes to us a young painter who, haunted since childhood by an aspiration to the absolute, passionate about literature and philosophy and concerned with social movements, had created for himself from the 1930s a universe of primordial and sexual forms. Vividly impressed by Western surrealist painting discovered at the Exhibition of the Confederation of Avant-garde Artists Paris-Tokyo (Kyoto, 1933), and especially by Tanguy and Ernst, he then became interested in psychoanalysis. Painting in the surrealist manner was for him a self-analysis, a means of exploring the deep layers of his personality. Without academic training, he thus satisfied a drive, more than he sought to explore a pictorial style. A painting from this period, The Genealogy of a Race (1937), has all the characteristics: interweaving of nocturnal visions, forms in gestation, metamorphoses. In 1941 everything changes, artists are arrested for their involvement in the avant-garde. But The Stones of Form, censored and lost painting, will be recreated under the title Dôsojin (1950), accentuating the sexual and blasphemous forms of the road stones symbols of unconscious desire.

Between 1941 and 1947, at a time when anti-surrealist repression incites painting to return to religious traditions, Komaki, who has become passionate about Buddhism, Shintoism and religious buildings, especially in Kyoto, the city par excellence of temples and classical art where he resides, then converts to "Buddhist-style" painting, with nationalist / pacifist connotations in wartime. But his paintings (Image of Bosatsu [Bodhisattva] floating in the air) divert the codes of Buddhism from which they seem to draw inspiration. The shadows painted on The Eleven-Headed Kannon (1943), which evoke the carved Buddhas of Kasagi temple, suggest the social cruelty and the painter's painful subconscious. This Buddhist or Shinto inspiration of the 1940s interpreted Japanese spirituality in the sense of subjective irrational and social unconscious, while restoring something of the mythical Japan crushed by Hiroshima. It reconciled popular aspirations for peace with the expression of the hidden torments of being.

One would never finish talking about the presence of Buddhism in Japanese avant-garde painting. I take this opportunity to point out that the particular question of affinities between Dadaism and Eastern mysticism has been widely documented (2).

Ikumi WATANABÉ, a researcher specialized in the study of surrealism, author in issue XXXVI of Mélusine of an article on "the discovery of references to Zen in André Breton" and in issue n° 38 of Lettres françaises of an "André Breton and Zen" (2018), refines here his problematic: André BRETON and a Zen dialogue on the "precious": preliminary notions for a study on the interpretation of Zen in André Breton. He compares a traditional dialogue between two Japanese monks, on the non-existence of the sacred and the preeminence of emptiness, with a Zen dialogue mentioned several times by Breton. To the question asked to the monk Sozan Daishi about what was most "precious" in the world, he answered in Magical Art (1957): "Anything. A carcass, the head of a dead cat." In a previous passage, Breton summoned Leonardo da Vinci and Cosimo, one advising painters to draw their subjects from "the accidental images of old walls," the other from the spittle of the sick. "The Automatic Message" (1933) also referred to the trivial imperfections of decrepit walls, objective because they existed outside the subject, but subjective because they subjected creation to desire. More than that of imagination, the question raised by Breton, in these different texts, was that of the relationship between subject and object. The non-contradictory relationship between the world and the self was ultimately dazzling. Leonardo da Vinci appears again in Mad Love (1937): everything man wants to know is written "in letters of desire" on the screen of objective chance, potentialized by the phantasmagorias of walls. The dead cat of the monk therefore equals the stains of the wall and the spittle, shifting the false question of the "precious" toward the subject's desire.

There is nevertheless a great difference between traditional monks and Breton, who extracted from their dialogue the new signifiers of objective chance, propitious to an imaginary and a desire to change the world rejected by Zen, in the name of renunciation of illusions and passion for emptiness. Watanabé concludes by showing how Breton's interpretation of Zen is circumscribed by the sources at his disposal and cultural implicits.

The Surrealism in Japan dossier ends with a tribute to Vera Linhartova, an essential reference of Japanese surrealism, as evidenced by her Dada and Surrealism in Japan (3) of 1987. Hervé-Pierre LAMBERT's article, Vera LINHARTOVA: from exile to Japanese culture, allows us to better know this Czech art historian and poetess, author of "meditative, hermetic, unclassifiable" prose (Kundera), who exiled herself to France at the time of the Soviet invasion of 1968, and there deepened her knowledge of Chinese and Japanese cultures. Haunted by exile and cultural nomadism, she published in 1974 an essay on the painter Joseph Sima, member of the Prague avant-garde group Devětsil, emigrated to France in 1921. Sima's imaginary, in resonance with Taoism and Chàn Buddhism, echoed her own affinities with Japanese culture and the idea of inner vision. The collections of Vera Linhartova published from 1974 to 1996 (Twor, Carnivorous Portraits, My Oubliettes), in French, reveal an "orientalizing" universe (p. 61) and a sensitivity to impermanence and the vibration of things.

In the 1980s, she devoted herself to Japanese surrealism. Her essays, Surrealist Painting in Japan 1925-1945 then Dada and Surrealism in Japan, enunciate an identity between poetry and painting common to surrealism and Japanese tradition. "Deep affinities" exist between Japanese artists and Dada-surrealists. Linhartova notes however the asymmetry between a Japan eager, in the years 1925-1930, to translate French surrealists and to be inspired by them, and a Parisian surrealism which, at the same time, was hardly interested in Japanese surrealism. The exhibition Japan of the Avant-gardes 1910-1970 at Beaubourg in 1986-1987, of which she was one of the curators, attempted, but a little late, to compensate for this lack.

Linhartova devotes a chapter of her 1987 essay to Takahashi Shinkishi, pioneer of the Dadaist movement in the 1920s, and draws a panorama of Japanese Dadaism and its different tendencies, modernist, "surrealist," or oriented, like Berlin Dadaism, toward political activism and proletarian art (Murayama Tomoyoshi in the years 1923-1926). I specify that Japanese Dadaism is today well known, notably thanks to Marc Dachy's essay Dada in Japan4 published in 2002, and to the chapters on the subject appearing in the catalog of the Dada exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (5) of 2005 and, that same year, in the collective work Dada circuit total (6).

Shinkishi's nihilism, who became a star of Zen poetry in the 1960s, is easy to relate to the negative thought of Chàn Buddhism, imported to Japan by the Rinzai school. His first Dadaist text is entitled Dada-butsu-mondô [Dialogue of Dada and Buddha]. Dangen wa dadaisuto [Without reply, the Dadaist] compares the "abnegation" of the Buddha, who affirms that "everything is everything," to DADA, which "says yes and no to everything, without appeal." Takigushi's commentaries on the 1918 Dada Manifesto, in Dada yori shururearisumu e [From Dada to Surrealism], fundamental text of 1929, also go in this direction.

Another great reference is the painter and poet Koga Harue, a student of Buddhism and author of a first Japanese surrealism quite independent of the Parisian movement. Linhartova shows that it is thanks to the avant-gardes that this artist was able to reconnect with the deep tendencies of Japanese art repressed by modernism. She cites the surrealist painter Fukuzawa Ichizô, pointing out in 1937 the similarities between the haiku of the Danrin school and Dadaist indifference, between the surrealist interest in the object and the stones placed in the basins of the Muromachi period, between the absolute of the surrealists and that of Zen. At the same time, the painter Kitawaki Norobu analyzed the analogies between the exquisite corpse and haikai renku, a sort of collective poem.

Linhartova is grateful to Japanese painters for having known how to use Western surrealism as a catalyst for a return to ancient Japanese poetry, without locking themselves into a dogma. On a White Background – Japanese Writings on Painting from the 11th to the 19th Century (1986), an anthology of illustrations and texts translated and commented on, deepens her reflection on Japanese surrealism through a search for the theoretical foundations of Japanese art. She opposes the periods when art was conceived as spiritual practice to those when it was only entertainment and emphasizes the great merit of Chàn, then Zen teaching, of having emphasized the creative process, synonymous with awakening, to the detriment of the concrete result. In 1999, Linhartova published Dôgen: Presence in the World, a choice of four chapters from Dôgen's Shôbôgenzô (13th century), still very incompletely translated at the time. The Zen monk there defends again the primacy of inner vision over pictorial forms...

EXCHANGES WITH JAPAN

This second section is devoted to relations between contemporary Japanese artists and Western creation.

Françoise Nicol questions The energy of Tsukui TOSHIAKI, painter and sculptor graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Tokyo, who settled in France in 1963 and creates, between Paris and Tokyo, alongside his wife, philosopher and poetess. His works are decipherable according to this "energy" which is called ki in Japanese (breath, power of elements and spirit) and energeia in ancient Greek (force in action). The artist maintains an essential relationship with nature, its internal vitality and its destructive force, in accordance with Japanese artistic tradition. But energy also emanates from the steel of his sculptures, breaking with the wood tradition of Kyoto temples. This results in paintings, sculptures and installations that combine nature with stone (tempera on paper with stones) or metal (cages inserted in vegetation). This double inspiration, natural and industrial, is perceived as non-contradictory, by virtue of the fundamental principles of Taoism. The metal and plant sculptures are traversed by living forces (attraction, repulsion, metamorphoses, balance-imbalance, shift). The artist's permanent installations integrate vegetation into public spaces, on a large scale in the 3000m2 of Nogi Park in Tokyo, encouraging visitors to question their relationship to nature and the new space created. In the park of the Ōhara Museum in Kurashiki, an intercultural dialogue is established between the artist's steel tubes in bundles and a Rodin statue.

Motoko NAKAMURA, an art historian born in Paris and living in Tokyo, analyzes the works of Marta Pan – a French sculptor of Hungarian origin – installed in Japan (Marta PAN and Japan). Her "floating sculptures," representative of organic abstraction, agree with "the Japanese vision of the floating world" (p. 80) and the impermanence embodied by ukiyo-e ("image of the floating world"), an artistic movement of the Edo period applied mainly to prints. Sorts of islands in harmony with the art of Japanese gardens, Marta Pan's sculptures also refer to the Hungarian ma, the "spatiotemporal notion of the in-between" (p. 81). The author of the article analyzes the subtle cultural interpenetrations that play with the symbolic complementarity of colors (red and green), the traditional combination of spaces, profane or sacred, in temple gardens, and exalt silence and the sound of water, the purity and simplicity of the Shinto spirit. At the same time, these works correspond to a modern conception of public space.

Two extracts from The Japanese Friend (2020) by Marc PETITJEAN (The Meeting / The Other) tell us about Japan through the author's encounters, photographer and documentary filmmaker. A meeting notably takes place with Kunihiko Moriguchi, in the old Okura hotel in Tokyo, full of history and Western/Eastern architecture. Moriguchi is the creator of amazing kimonos, adorned with geometric patterns, sometimes arranged in trompe-l'œil to resemble the square papers (shikishi) used for calligraphy of poems or drawings. A tea ceremony is an opportunity to evoke, in a very scholarly way, the art of ancient bowls, gardens, fundamental colors – black and white – with meanings so different from ours. Zen Buddhism is not far...

Shungo MORITA's article, When the butterfly flies away from a carafe – the challenge of the French poetry reading workshop in Japan, raises a fascinating question: how can a Japanese student of modern French poetry understand texts whose syntax, according to Aragon's expression, "is trampled like grapes" (p. 91)? A researcher in contemporary French poetry, and author of a recent thesis on Henri Meschonnic at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Morita opens his article with an extract from Breton's Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality, aiming to prove that poetry has no other meaning than itself and that it is vain to want to interpret it. Now this is very difficult to hear for Japanese students curious about French poetry and confronted with texts so hermetic, so polysemic, that the question of why words becomes an existential puzzle! But in the end, Morita remarks, don't the frantic linguistic gropings of these readers, not very helped by the feverish use of dictionaries, transform them into demiurges of a language in the making, which is the very essence of poetry?

Impressions of Japan (2016), the engravings of Dominique LIMON, painter, sculptor and publisher in l'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, punctuate with great accuracy (p. 66, 93, 94) the idea, present in several articles, of the identity between painting and poetry in Japan

THE ARTIST TAKESHI MOTOMIYA

This last section pays tribute to Takeshi MOTOMIYA, a multidisciplinary artist born in Tokyo and living in Barcelona since 1986. Atsuko NAGAÏ offers a translation of The Alpinist & the Painter, a text by the artist that compares his emotions before the white canvas to those of the alpinist raising his eyes toward an unexplored summit close to the divine. Then she describes The "Manufacture" of Barcelona, located at the foot of Mount Tibidabo. This workshop, whose appellation has an artisanal connotation, resembles a carpenter's construction site, an open crypt on the infinite, a boat hangar offered to the vast world...

Martine MONTEAU extends this portrait (Takeshi MOTOMIYA, meditate) with a description of the artist's work, applying to wooden panels, like Tapiès and Barcelò alongside whom he practiced engraving, natural pigments destined to transform into light and various textures. In Japan things have a soul. Motomiya's works are "sober, silent, morandinian" (p.99), figuring ephemeral apparitions of human figures or revealing simple and symbolic objects, on the threshold of the invisible. His invitation to meditation on the traces and wear of time excludes neither the abyss nor Hell. But the Real stumbles on a "space of the visible" (p. 99) which often protects us from a threatening exile. The sacred, the bridges toward an elsewhere and the rereading of myths (Greek, biblical, etc.), reflected by the titles, vibrate to the rhythm of saturated or contrasted colors, shamanic and Buddhist mandalas, transformations of the Mystical Wheel, symbolic interpretations given to our time...

CONCLUSION

This issue of the journal A Littérature-action has convinced us of the deep links between Japanese art and Western art, surrealist or contemporary. With Dada it is the part of emptiness, inherent to Zen Buddhism, that establishes the bridge. With surrealism it is that of the dream, emanating from ancient Japanese painting in echo with the psychoanalytic unconscious. As for the part of revolt common to these two movements, it has inscribed itself, differently according to the times and artists, in a Japanese context often troubled or repressive. Contemporary art, in a version certainly more "globalized," replays the same score: questioning of borders, between countries and cultures (ultra-contemporary Japanese sculpture and Rodin), styles (the Hungarian ma and floating sculptures), arts (poetry and engraving) and elements (nature and steel). This score is an ode to the transcultural spirit claimed by the journal.

(1) This journal can be ordered on the website www.revue-a.fr or by email at marsa@free.fr
(2) One can refer in particular to the very complete chapter "Dada and mysticism: influences and affinities" by Richard Sheppard, in Dada spectrum: the dialectics of revolt, edited by Stephen C. Foster, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 1979, p. 91-113.
(3) Dada and Surrealism in Japan (1987), Publications orientalistes de France, texts chosen, translated and presented by Vera Linhartova.
(4) Dada in Japan, PUF, 2002, 225 p.
(5) JAPAN, in DADA, catalog directed by Laurent Le Bon, p. 540-543.
(6) JAPAN RISING, in Dada circuit total, dossier coordinated by Henri Béhar and Catherine Dufour, L'Âge d'homme, 2005, p. 445-458. Fumi Tsukahara's article, "Dada, Mava, Neo Dada. Abridged history of Japanese Dadaism and its surroundings" (2005) is accompanied by a translation of Takahashi Shinkichi's first Japanese Dada manifesto, "Affirmation is Dadaist" (1921), and a chronology of Japanese Dadaism from 1929 to 1970.